Tag / Header Bidding

Any AdExchanger reader probably knows more about data management technology than the average Joe, but many probably associate data management platforms (DMPs) with creating audience segments for programmatic media.

While segmentation, audience analytics, lookalike modeling and attribution are currently the primary use cases for DMP tech, there is so much more that can be done with access to all that user data in one place. These platforms sitting at the center of a marketer’s operational stack can make an impact far beyond paid media.

As data platforms mature, both publishers and marketers are starting to think beyond devices and browsers, and putting people in the center of what they do. Increasingly, this means focusing on giving the people what they want. In some cases that means no ads at all, while in others it’s the option to value certain audiences over others and serve them an ad first or deliver the right content – not just ads – based on their preferences.

Beyond personalization, there are DMP plays to be made in the areas of ad blocking and header bidding.

Ad Blocking

DMPs see a lot of browsers and devices on a monthly basis and strive to aggregate those disparate identities into a single user or universal consumer ID. They are also intimately involved in the serving of ads by either ingesting ad logs, deploying pixels or having a server-to-server connection with popular ad servers. This is great for influencing the serving of online ads across channels, but maybe it can help with one of the web’s most perplexing problems: the nonserving of ads.

With reports of consumers using applications to block as many as 10% of ads, wouldn’t it be great to know exactly who is blocking those ads? For publishers, that might mean identifying those users and suppressing them from targeting lists so they can help marketers get a better understanding of how much reach they have in certain audience segments. Once the “blockers” are segmented, publishers can get a fine-grained understanding of their composition, giving them insights about what audiences are more receptive to having ad-free or paid content experiences.

A lot of these issues are being solved today with specialized scripts that either aren’t very well coded, leading to page latency, or are scripted in-house, adding to complexity. Scripts trigger the typical “see ads or pay” notifications, which publishers have seen become more effective over time. The DMP, already installed and residing in the header across the enterprise, can provision this small feature alongside the larger application.

Header Bidding

Speaking of DMP architecture being in the header, I often wonder why publishers who have a DMP installed insist on deploying a different header-bidding solution to manage direct deals. Data management tech essentially operates by placing a control tag within the header of a publisher website, enabling a framework that gives direct and primary access to users entering the page. Through an integration with the ad server, the DMP can easily and quickly decide whether or not to deliver high-value “first looks” at inventory.

Today, the typical large publisher has a number of supply-side platforms (SSPs) set up to handle yield management, along with possibly several pieces of infrastructure to manage that critical programmatic direct sale. Publishers can reduce complexity and latency by simply using the pipes that have already been deployed for the very reason header bidding exists: understanding and managing the serving of premium ads to the right audiences.

Maybe publishers should be thinking about header bidding in a new way. Header-bidding tags are just another tag on the page. Those with tag management-enabled DMPs could have their existing architecture handle that – a salient point made recently by STAQ’s James Curran.

Curran also noted that the DMP has access, through ad log ingestion, to how much dough publishers get from every drop in the waterfall, including from private marketplace, programmatic direct header and the open exchanges. Many global publishers are looking at the DMP inside their stack as a hub that can see the pricing landscape at an audience level and power ad servers and SSPs with the type of intelligent decisioning that supercharges yield management.

Personalization

In ad technology, we talk a lot about the various partners enabling “paid, owned and earned” exposures to consumers, but we usually think of DMPs as essential only for the paid part.

But the composition of a web page, for example, is filled with dozens of little boxes, each capable of serving a display ad, video ad, social widget or content. Just as the DMP can influence the serving of ads into those little boxes, it can also influence the type of content that appears to each user. The big automaker might want to show a muscle car to that NASCAR Dad when he hits the page or a shiny new SUV to the Suburban Mom who shuttles the kids around all day.

Or, a marketer with a lot of its own content (“brands are publishers,” right?) may want to recommend its own articles or videos based on the browsing behavior of an anonymous user. The big global publisher may want to show a subscriber of one magazine a series of interesting articles from its other publications, possibly outperforming the CPA deals it has with third parties for subscription marketing.

This one-to-one personalization is possible because DMPs can capture not only the obvious cookie data but also the other 60% of user interactions and data, including mobile apps, mobile web, beacon data and even modeled propensity data from a marketer or publisher’s data warehouse.

Wouldn’t it be cool to serve an ad for a red car when the user has a statistically significant overlap with 10,000 others who have purchased red cars in the past year? That’s how to apply data science to drive real content personalization, rather than typical retargeting.

These are just some of the possibilities available when you start to think as the DMP as not just a central part of the ad technology “stack” but the brains behind everything that can be done with audiences. This critical infrastructure is where audience data gets ingested in real time, deployed to the right channels at speed and turned into insights about people. In a short period of time, the term “DMP” will likely be shorthand for the simple audience targeting use case inside of the data-driven marketing hub.